I found myself staring at a bulletin board covered with photographs of OHS alumni holding up T-shirts displaying their collegiate futures: Wake Forest and Vanderbilt and UNC; sometimes Dartmouth or Caltech or Yale. The rest of the school was papered with pep rally banners and bake sale flyers; kids chewed gum and made out and bartered cigarettes and Ritalin. But here, in the nonsense-free honors corridors, there was a different currency. A currency that meant the unlikeliest people were rich, as I remembered when I saw who was now pushing open Mrs. Latimer’s door. Shruti Patel stopped in her tracks to see me outside.

“Oh, Neil!” she said, in that scratchy voice. “I always forget you’re an honors kid.”

“What a compliment, Shroots,” I said.

She plonked down next to me. “Mrs. Latimer is making some important phone calls on my behalf right now, so you’re going to have to wait a little bit. There are a lot of people who might want to have me around for the summer. What are you doing?”

Shruti wouldn’t speak to Juhi or Isha or Kartik or even Manu this way. It was me she felt comfortable poking at, and while normally I wouldn’t deprive her of this rare social joy, I was irritable that day. It was the end of a lemonade cycle, and I’d been trudging through precalculus homework feeling laconic and woolly.

“A debate institute,” I said evenly. “In East Lansing.”

She tugged one of her springy locks of hair. Her eyes crossed as she watched it bounce.

“I wish I had a track like you,” she said. “I have to be creative about my summers. Mrs. Latimer’s calling up this Congresswoman—” I tried to close my eyes and ignore Shruti as she painted pictures of her possible opportunities: bustling around Washington, D.C., chasing a House member, or being flown to Hong Kong to participate in a youth entrepreneurship summit, or immersing in a program for math geniuses at Stanford, and she was pretty sure Stanford was practically on the beach, so she’d be solving integrals in the sand. “But I heard from Mia Ahmed that people have tons of fun at debate camp, too.”

“Institute,” I said through gritted teeth, as though that sounded better.

“Mia says there’s this place in Michigan that’ll deep fry a burrito, an Oreo, anything you want. And a shop for dollar pizza. She got drunk in East Lansing last summer. She says there are hobos you can just ask to buy you alcohol. But promise you won’t, Neil, okay? Don’t get drunk in East Lansing all summer, right when you were getting to be so smart—”

“Neil Narayan?” Mrs. Latimer, a graying woman with an air of brutal capability, stepped into the hallway. “Oh, Shruti, you’re still here? I’ll get back to you about Hong Kong. I couldn’t reach that alum.”